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How we began



WeDpro believes the world will be a better place if oppressed and exploited people are helped and they also extend help to support each other, especially those with unheard voices, the disadvantaged and those in the fringes of our communities.

In 1989, members of the first feminist collective, the Katipunan ng Kababaihan para sa Kalayaan or KALAYAAN (Women’s League for Liberation) established in 1983, came together at the height of the national debates on the presence of the U.S. military bases in the country. They founded WeDpro, Inc. as a non-profit, enthused by the possibility of engaging in the call to create a program that would design a comprehensive bases conversion for the would-be displaced women in the baselands. This marked the beginning of WeDpro’s engagement as a feminist, gender-responsive organization in the Philippines. In its own quiet way, WeDpro through the years, supported by its founders, members, staff, supporters and friends, crafted and implemented pioneering programs, projects and activities. Some of these are the template for the Comprehensive Bases Program for Women in the cities of Angeles in Pampanga (Clark Air Base) and Olongapo in Zambales (Subic Naval Base); the establishment of the first lesbian hotline; organizing and support for the First National Lesbian Rights Conference (FLRC), the First National Conference on Prostitution, the First National Conference on Amerasians, among others.

Like many non-profits, WeDpro buffeted the whimsy winds of the changing global socio-political and economic landscape of donor support, and the challenges posed by the limited resources to sustain its work with its communities of poor, marginalized women and youth. Beginning late-2005, ideas about a new way of working percolated. Planning started, slow but with a certain vision that would hopefully contribute to the transformation of value, ethics, structure, processes in the non-profit world that eschews the principles of transparency, accountability, commitment and responsiveness.

In December 2011, WeDpro launched its WeDpro Collective with a group of 32 individuals, pioneers in various aspects of social development and young, committed batch of individuals with a wide array of expertise drawn to the vision of WeDpro. WeDpro is alive much more than ever, immersed in sustaining its gains through the years, challenged by the myriad problems that beset the world, the country and its communities.The WeDpro Collective with its Board of Directors face all this with the unrelenting resolve to make human rights and gender-responsiveness the core of its programs, projects and activities that respond appropriately to the lives of the marginalized, the discriminated, the poor.